Religious Appropriation, Idealization, and Equivocation: Dynamics of Spiritual Learning from Latin American Indigenous Visitors in the Contemporary Czech Republic

ABSTRACT: Religious appropriation, associated with idealization and romanticization, has a bad reputation in anthropology and is often portrayed as an obstacle to mutually meaningful interreligious engagement. Drawing on my ethnography of a particular indigenous visit from the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta, Colombia, to the Czech Republic, I reexamine this issue using the concept of equivocation as an ontological understanding-in-misunderstanding that occurs when different worlds meet and are translated. Mutual idealization is difficult to avoid in these encounters, but both sides can still find them meaningful and rewarding precisely because they take place within their own perspectives, through which they expose themselves to otherness and possibilities of transformation. Finally, I suggest that in assessing the engagement of indigenous cosmologies and rituals with the Western alternative spiritual (“New Age”) milieu, an irreducible diversity of voices, approaches, and agency should be considered.